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“FORT BUCHANAN”— Romantic Turmoil

When Roger Sherwood’s husband Frank is sent on a mission to Djibouti, Roger remains behind with his adopted daughter, the temperamental Roxy, at Fort Buchanan, a remote base in the middle of the woods. Over the course of that year, he seeks advice, company and consolation from a middle-aged woman, from three wives abandoned by their husbands, and a farmer and personal-trainer. He learns that all of who are dealing with their own romantic turmoil.

“Fort Buchanan” is directed by American filmmaker Benjamin Crotty and it looks at living on an army base with a rebellious adopted daughter. The daughter, Roxy is quite the girl exhibiting buxom, earthy charms that constantly tempt sexually frustrated army wives to engage in gossip.

At first, “Fort Buchanan” seems to be Initially structured around the domestic inner workings of an army base and focuses on the lives of several broken family units as examines the entwined sexual activities and tastes of forsaken spouses. But it really exploits the familiarity of its setup to emphasize its disinterest in sticking to formulas, considering recognizable plotlines before tossing them aside as the film moves between military and civilian life. We have an atmosphere of desire—whether quashed, fulfilled, or neglected that comes to us in different and strange ways.

The base becomes a sylvan retreat that seems to have returned back into the forest and seems like a summer camp more than anything else. Here the spouses, most of them female, play out a queer-oriented roundelay of sexual gamesmanship, pressuring the naïve Roger (Andy Gillet) who is stubbornly faithful to his Djibouti-stationed husband, Frank (David Baiot) to join them. A similar pressure is exerted upon the local fitness instructor/mysterious woodsman (Guillaume Palin), with the general uptick in sexual energy apparently timed to the sexual awakening of Roger and Frank’s adopted daughter, Roxy (Iliana Zabeth) who is introduced into a the coven of part-time lesbians.

From beginning to end, Crotty backs up his ideas with humor and the sensual evocation of the base’s natural setting. The film which never settles into any identifiable rhythm; instead it drifts freely through a tangle of relationships as it looks at the intricacies of group mechanic.

When Roger and the wives go to visit their husbands in Djibouti, Roger finds that the spark has gone out of his marriage. Hoping to reignite the flame with his husband Frank (David Baiot) Roger takes certain measures which leave him, when they fail, standing alone in the middle of a party. He no longer really knows who his husband is or what he wants, and this is the matter at the heart of Crotty’s film.

The film presents us with a scenario in which the two parties of various marriages are split apart and made to live in different worlds. In a marriage of two people, as they live through shared experiences, the hope is that they will grow together through the seasons but when separated into drastically different worlds the two people are likely to grow in opposite directions. In “Fort Buchanan” this is so to such an extent that not only can the divided people not be together when reunited in one world or the other; they are not even able to live in that other world.

In addition to this complex emotional aspect between lovers, sexual frustrations fizz and than fall flat. Sex drives divert and digress and lead the characters into cross-currents of interaction with one another and the wives begin to turn their attentions towards Frank and Roger’s sometimes violent daughter, Roxy (Iliana Zabeth).

This is a look at intimacy and the lives of characters of characters that is fascinating, often funny and sometimes sad.